Methods for Assessing Visual Images and Depictions of Climate Change

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Hansen
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Environmental Communication ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Climate Change Research ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The 1960S

Visual representation has been important in communicating and constructing the environment as a focus for public and political concern since the rise of environmentalism in the 1960s. As communications media have themselves become increasingly visual with the rise of digital media, so too has visual communication become key to public debate about environmental issues, no more so than in public debate and the politics of climate change. This chapter surveys the methods, approaches, and frameworks deployed in emerging research on public-mediated visual communication about climate change. Research on the visual mediation of climate change is itself part of the emerging field of visual environmental communication research, defined as research concerned with theorizing and empirically examining how visual imagery contributes to the increasingly multimodal public communication of the environment. Focused on a sociological understanding of the contribution that visuals make to the social, political, and cultural construction of “the environment,” visual environmental communication research analytically requires a multimodal approach, which situates analysis of the semiotic, discursive, rhetorical, and narrative characteristics of visuals in relation to the communicative, cultural, and historical contexts and in relation to the three main sites—production, content, and audiences/consumption—of communication in the public sphere.

scholarly journals More Inclusive, More Practical: Climate Change Communication Research to Serve the Future

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Eise ◽  
Natalie Lambert ◽  
Tiwaladeoluwa Adekunle ◽  
Laura Eise
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Impacts ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Climate Change Communication ◽  
Climate Change Research ◽  
Global Food Security ◽  
Change Communication ◽  
Mitigation And Adaptation ◽  
Current Climate

Climate change impacts are being felt around the world, threatening human well-being and global food security. Social scientists in communication and other fields, in tandem with physical scientists, are critical for implementing mitigation and adaptation strategies effectively and equitably. In the face of rapidly evolving circumstances, it is time to take stock of our current climate change communication research and look toward where we need to go. Based on our systematic review of mid- to current climate change research trends in communication as well as climate change response recommendations by the American Meteorological Society, we suggest future directions for research. We urgently recommend communication research that (1) addresses immediate mitigation and adaptation concerns in local communities and (2) is more geographically diverse, particularly focusing on the African continent, the Caribbean, Latin America, the Middle East and certain parts of Asia.

scholarly journals Bees, Extinction and Ambient Soundscapes: An Exploratory Environmental Communication Workshop

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 153
Author(s):  
Rosamund Portus ◽  
Claire McGinn
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Environmental Communication ◽  
Potential Benefits

As a response to the challenges that visual communication, popularly used in environmental communications, poses for more embodied engagements with climate change, this article focuses upon the neglected role of sound within environmental and climate communication scholarship. Focusing upon the decline of bees as a meaningful topic for the exploration of climate change, this article draws on research conducted with participants of a soundscape workshop to investigate the potential benefits and limitations of using sound-based activities to communicate about a specific climate change topic. This article demonstrates that modes of communicating climate change that encourage people to participate in imaginative, creative and future-based thinking can provide an effective way to engage audiences with the topic of climate change, thus encouraging greater individual and collective action.

scholarly journals Visual climate change communication: key points for public engagement 

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosmarie de Wit ◽  
Annemarie Lexer ◽  
Matthias Themessl ◽  
Andrea Prutsch
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Young Adults ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Communication Research ◽  
Climate Change Communication ◽  
Change Communication ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Best Practice Guidelines ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations

<p>‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ and ‘seeing is believing’. Clearly, images are considered to be incredibly powerful communication tools. The project ‚Images of Change’, which is funded by the Austrian Climate Research Program, wants to harness the power of visuals in climate change communication. To do so, the project focusses at developing different visual communication formats aimed at young adults, with the goal to support a better understanding of facts and invite climate friendly behavior as well as policy acceptance. In order to hit the ground running, existing (visual) climate change communication formats of different national meteorological and environmental organizations, academia, the media as well as non- governmental organizations (NGOs) were collected, analyzed and compared to best practices as reported in climate communication research. Here, we will present an overview of the key findings from psychological as well as communication research on how to successfully communicate the causes, impacts and solutions of climate change to non-scientists. Specifics on how to engage young adults as well as how to implement visuals in climate change communication in order to achieve the highest impact and increase the motivation to act in a climate friendly manner will also be highlighted. Finally, a selection of existing visual communication campaigns will be presented and discussed. Based on these formats, we will take a deeper look into how the best practice guidelines postulated by the communication science community may be implemented in our own work as climate communicators in academia as well as national weather services.</p>

THE BIRTH OF SPACE OCEANOGRAPHY: TECHNOLOGICAL QUESTIONS AND CLIMATOLOGICAL OPPORTUNITY (UNITED STATES, FRANCE, 1950–1980)

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-136
Author(s):  
JÉRÔME LAMY
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Climate Change Research ◽  
Climate Change Issue ◽  
Space Agency ◽  
Scientific Specialty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scientific Meetings ◽  
The 1960S

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the formation of space oceanography as a scientific specialty, in France and in the United States. Throughout much of its history, oceanography has relied upon a broad range of instrumentation (bathyscaphes, tide gauges, and so forth). The importance of instrumentation meant that many of the exchanges during major scientific meetings in the 1960s focused on engineering problems. As a result, institutional investments by NASA and the French space agency, the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) supported advances in instrumentation. The emergence of the climate change issue made it possible to merge several factors (technical, geopolitical, and institutional) into the specialty of space oceanography. The birth of a scientific specialty requires the conjunction of several determining factors: a powerful disciplinary basis, a technological innovation resulting in major advances, and scientific politicians capable of tackling new problems. The development of space oceanography provides an excellent example of the origin of a new scientific specialty. The purpose of this article is to trace the history of the combination of the technical and scientific factors that resulted in the origin of space oceanography. This article will focus on specific events that led to the origin of space oceanography, in particular on a series of meetings organized by researchers interested in very specific technical questions. Many of the classical questions of oceanography could be addressed and dealt with by developing and using new instruments (e.g. radar altimeters). To document how the specialty of space oceanography developed, I propose to follow American and French examples of the transformations induced by space oceanography. Such a comparison makes it possible to measure the differential scientific ‘maturity’ of a nascent speciality. The emergence of climate change research, starting in the 1970s, reorganized many of the oceanographic research questions and legitimized the extension of the discipline into geospatial research. One goal of this article is to understand how this development of science policy influenced interactions between different disciplines.

Im Archiv der Öffentlichkeit

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Maresch
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Structural Transformation ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Oder Eine ◽  
The Public ◽  
Postal Services ◽  
The Public Sphere

Durch den digitalen Medienwandel ist der Begriff der Öffentlichkeit problematisch geworden. Die Debatte fokussiert sich zumeist auf die Frage, ob die sogenannte bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit durch das Internet im Niedergang begriffen ist oder eine Intensivierung und Pluralisierung erfährt. Rudolf Maresch zeichnet die berühmte Untersuchung der Kategorie durch Jürgen Habermas nach und zieht den von ihm konstatierten Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit in Zweifel. Dagegen verweist er auf die gouvernementalen und medialen Prozesse, die jede Form von Kommunikation immer schon gesteuert haben. Öffentlichkeit sei daher ein Epiphänomen nicht allein des Zeitungswesens, sondern der bereits vorgängig ergangenen postalischen Herstellung einer allgemeinen Adressierbarkeit von Subjekten. Heute sei Öffentlichkeit innerhalb der auf Novitäts- und Erregungskriterien abstellenden Massenmedien ein mit anderen Angeboten konkurrierendes Konzept. Mercedes Bunz konstatiert ebenfalls eine Ausweitung und Pluralisierung von Öffentlichkeit durch den digitalen Medienwandel, sieht aber die entscheidenden Fragen in der Konzeption und Verteilung von Evaluationswissen und Evaluationsmacht. Nicht mehr die sogenannten Menschen, sondern Algorithmen entscheiden über die Verbreitung und Bewertung von Nachrichten. Diese sind in der Öffentlichkeit – die sie allererst erzeugen – weitgehend verborgen. Einig sind sich die Autoren darin, dass es zu einer Pluralisierung von Öffentlichkeiten gekommen ist, während der Öffentlichkeitsbegriff von Habermas auf eine singuläre Öffentlichkeit abstellt. </br></br>Due to the transformation of digital media, the notion of “publicity” has become problematic. In most cases, the debate is focused on the question whether the internet causes a decline of so-called civic publicity or rather intensifies and pluralizes it. Rudolf Maresch outlines Jürgen Habermas's famous study of this category and challenges his claim concerning its “structural transformation,” referring to the governmental and medial processes which have always already controlled every form of communication. Publicity, he claims, is an epiphenomenon not only of print media, but of a general addressability of subjects, that has been produced previously by postal services. Today, he concludes, publicity is a concept that competes with other offers of mass media, which are all based on criteria of novelty and excitement. Mercedes Bunz also notes the expansion and pluralization of the public sphere due to the change of digital media, but sees the crucial issues in the design and distribution of knowledge and power by evaluation. So-called human beings no longer decide on the dissemination and evaluation of information, but algorithms, which are for the most part concealed from the public sphere that they produce in the first place. Both authors agree that a pluralization of public sphere(s) has taken place, while Habermas's notion of publicity refers to a single public sphere.

The Historiography of Environmental History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. McNeill
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Industrial Pollution ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Environmental Concerns ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the emergence of environmental history, which developed in the context of the environmental concerns that began in the 1960s with worries about local industrial pollution, but which has since evolved into a full-scale global crisis of climate change. Environmental history is ‘the history of the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature’. It includes three chief areas of inquiry: the study of material environmental history, political and policy-related environmental history, and a form of environmental history which concerns what humans have thought, believed, written, and more rarely, painted, sculpted, sung, or danced that deals with the relationship between society and nature. Since 1980, environmental history has come to flourish in many corners of the world, and scholars everywhere have found models, approaches, and perspectives rather different from those developed for the US context.

scholarly journals Contrasting Evolution Patterns of Endorheic and Exorheic Lakes on the Central Tibetan Plateau and Climate Cause Analysis during 1988–2017

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 1962
Author(s):  
Zhilong Zhao ◽  
Yue Zhang ◽  
Zengzeng Hu ◽  
Xuanhua Nie
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Tibetan Plateau ◽  
Climatic Factors ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Annual Precipitation ◽  
The Tibetan Plateau ◽  
Lake Area ◽  
Climate Change Research ◽  
Mean Temperature

The alpine lakes on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) are indicators of climate change. The assessment of lake dynamics on the TP is an important component of global climate change research. With a focus on lakes in the 33° N zone of the central TP, this study investigates the temporal evolution patterns of the lake areas of different types of lakes, i.e., non-glacier-fed endorheic lakes and non-glacier-fed exorheic lakes, during 1988–2017, and examines their relationship with changes in climatic factors. From 1988 to 2017, two endorheic lakes (Lake Yagenco and Lake Zhamcomaqiong) in the study area expanded significantly, i.e., by more than 50%. Over the same period, two exorheic lakes within the study area also exhibited spatio-temporal variability: Lake Gaeencuonama increased by 5.48%, and the change in Lake Zhamuco was not significant. The 2000s was a period of rapid expansion of both the closed lakes (endorheic lakes) and open lakes (exorheic lakes) in the study area. However, the endorheic lakes maintained the increase in lake area after the period of rapid expansion, while the exorheic lakes decreased after significant expansion. During 1988–2017, the annual mean temperature significantly increased at a rate of 0.04 °C/a, while the annual precipitation slightly increased at a rate of 2.23 mm/a. Furthermore, the annual precipitation significantly increased at a rate of 14.28 mm/a during 1995–2008. The results of this study demonstrate that the change in precipitation was responsible for the observed changes in the lake areas of the two exorheic lakes within the study area, while the changes in the lake areas of the two endorheic lakes were more sensitive to the annual mean temperature between 1988 and 2017. Given the importance of lakes to the TP, these are not trivial issues, and we now need accelerated research based on long-term and continuous remote sensing data.

Twitter Users’ Displays of Affect in the Global Warming Debate

2021 ◽  
pp. 004728162110078
Author(s):  
Shanna Cameron ◽  
Alexandra Russell ◽  
Luke Brake ◽  
Katherine Fredlund ◽  
Angela Morris
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
Technical Communication ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Climate Change Research ◽  
Quantitative Content ◽  
Twitter Users

This article engages with recent discussions in the field of technical communication that call for climate change research that moves beyond the believer/denier dichotomy. For this study, our research team coded 900 tweets about climate change and global warming for different emotions in order to understand how Twitter users rely on affect rhetorically. Our findings use quantitative content analysis to challenge current assumptions about writing and affect on social media, and our results indicate a number of arenas for future research on affect, global warming, and rhetoric.

scholarly journals Pedagogical publics: Creating sustainable educational environments in times of climate change

2021 ◽  
pp. 147490412110056
Author(s):  
Lovisa Bergdahl ◽  
Elisabet Langmann
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Public Pedagogy ◽  
Sustainable Living ◽  
The Public ◽  
Educational Environments ◽  
Adults And Children ◽  
Emotional Dimensions ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Sustainability Challenges ◽  
Educational Scholarship

The paper offers a pedagogical response to the complexity of sustainability challenges that takes the existential and emotional dimensions of climate change seriously. To this end, the paper unfolds in two parts. The first part makes a distinction between ‘public pedagogy’ as an area of educational scholarship and ‘pedagogical publics’ as a theoretical lens for identifying certain qualities within educational environments, exploring what potential this distinction has for rethinking public pedagogy for sustainable development. Turning to Bonnie Honig (2015) and her call for creating ‘holding environments’ in the public sphere as a response to the democratic need of our time, the second part translates her political notion into an educational notion asking what fostering pedagogical publics as holding environments might involve. In relation to sustainability challenges, it is suggested that an environment that ‘holds’ people together as a pedagogical public has three main qualities: a) it makes room for new rituals for sustainable living to be developed in order to offer a sense of permanence; b) it invites narratives that can frame sustainability challenges in more positive registers; and c) it reinstates an intergenerational difference that serves to give back hopes and dreams to adults and children in troubling times.

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